Dear Weekend Jolter,
What’s the German word for being right when you don’t want to be?
Jim Geraghty noted this week that he faced pushback for saying in 2025 that America had “effectively switched sides in the Russia-Ukraine War.” Since then,
we’ve seen the Trump administration roll out the red carpet (literally) for Vladimir Putin in Alaska, invite Putin to the G-20 summit, and invite other Russian officials to a separate G-20 meeting. President Trump has also declared that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should be replaced, contradicted his own cabinet about Russia’s help to Iran, downplayed an obvious and ongoing series of Russian hybrid warfare attacks against our European NATO allies, and turned down offers of Ukrainian assistance with drone production.
And yet, as much as those developments reinforce the impression that we are, in fact, on the wrong side, the relationship between America and Ukraine worsens still. It may soon hit a breaking point.
This week, Ukraine accused Elon Musk’s SpaceX of imposing “new limits on military-grade Starlink terminals without warning, hobbling Kyiv’s ability to conduct midrange drone attacks and intercept Russia’s new-generation jet-powered drones,” per the Wall Street Journal. Connectivity was being restored as accusations flew over the cause, but Musk himself said limits on the military application Starshield are decided by “the US military and ultimately POTUS.” The disruption came as President Trump pressures Ukraine to stop hitting Russian oil refineries — this, amid reported threats and speculation about the U.S. withholding vital intelligence.
Trump’s recently announced diesel deal with Russia — to supposedly put downward pressure on fuel prices ahead of the midterms — has had the most explosive effect politically, at home and abroad.
“I have righteous anger, and it’s palpable anger on this whole thing,” GOP Representative Don Bacon told NR’s Charles Hilu. “I can’t believe we’ve got a president that is literally kissing Putin’s ass.”
Amid mounting bipartisan pushback, Trump’s attitude toward Volodymyr Zelensky is curdling into open hostility, while the Ukrainian president lashes out at the U.S. in kind. The New York Times reports that U.S.-Ukraine ties are facing “the biggest crisis” since 2025’s acrimonious Oval Office meeting.
Noah Rothman notes that Trump could try to patch things up with Zelensky once his outreach to Vladimir Putin goes nowhere. This, after all, is the Trump way. But Noah writes that the “public’s patience with the administration’s manic-depressive relationship with Ukraine should be exhausted by now.” John Puri, observing the week’s diplomatic wreckage, echoes Jim’s assessment from last year. NR’s editorial, meanwhile, lists the many trade-offs Trump has made in exchange for, at best, a transitory appeasement of voter concerns:
He has delivered yet again a message that the U.S. can be an unreliable ally, a message that will be heard far beyond Kyiv. It will add to internal tensions within the Atlantic Alliance, it will weaken Ukraine, and it will encourage Moscow and Beijing. And Vladimir Putin will doubtless welcome the extra money the deal will send Russia’s way, money that will be spent on destroying yet more of Ukraine.
Making matters worse still, Trump has signaled to Moscow and Beijing that his domestic political weakness, something that is unlikely to diminish any time soon, will be a rich source of pressure points.
Andy McCarthy adds that apart from providing extra cash to Putin that will serve no virtuous purpose, “Trump is both dismantling the American sanction weapon that has wounded Putin and conveying to other nations that they should be doing business with Moscow, not sanctioning and isolating it.”
Why would Trump do this? Jeff Blehar searches for answers. But the upshot is that Washington is pulling further away from Kyiv at a crucial time, even as Ukraine’s many remaining allies in Congress decry this “betrayal.”
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
There sure is a lot of smoke here: El-Sayed’s Troubling Ties
Lawmakers and the president ignore the fiscal crisis at their, and the nation’s, peril: Congress’s $2 Trillion Problem
Well, it’s probably going to be even harder to pay off those AmEx bills now: Guilfoyle’s Exit
ARTICLES
Christopher J. Scalia: Naipaul’s Nobel
Dan McLaughlin: The Senate Is Breaking Closer
Eva Terry: The U.S. Needs Lithium — but Washington Makes It Next to Impossible to Mine
Andrew McCarthy: What to Make of the Trump DOJ’s Investigation of Ilhan Omar
Charles C. W. Cooke: On the Strange and Tragic Accident at Six Flags Over Georgia
Ramesh Ponnuru: How El-Sayed Lies About His Health-Care Plan
Eugene B. Meyer: Fusionism, Properly Understood
Christian Schneider: The Left’s Performative Misunderstanding
Tanner Nau: This Obscure Balkan Territory Has a Lot of Friends in Trump World
Nina Shea: Xi ‘Sinicizes’ China’s Catholic Church, with Vatican Approval
Dan McLaughlin: The Revolutionary Battle of Valcour Island
Joseph Filocomo: Columbus Without Apology
J. Michael Waller: AI Does Not Need a ‘Nuclear Freeze’
Brittany Bernstein: Dem Campaign Ads Cite Soros-Backed Fake News Sites to Sway Voters in Key Races
Brittany Bernstein: Nine Major Banks ‘Denied, Debanked, and Discriminated Against’ Conservatives, Trump Admin Probe Finds
Daniel Foster: A Recipe for Greta Thunberg
CAPITAL MATTERS
John Puri tackles the topic of economic nostalgia: Our Economic Past Was Not Always Greener
Howard Husock weighs in on the feds’ Wells Fargo investigation: Why HUD’s Pushback Against DEI Mortgages Is Good for Black Wealth
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen, on another side of Homer: Winslow Homer the Painter, We Knew — but an Etcher, Too?
EXCERPTS, JUST SO
John Puri crunches the data on affordability and finds the popular assertions of economic nostalgia to be mostly fiction, with some important exceptions (read on; there are charts):
In many categories, expenses as a share of household income have gone down since the ’80s, even as overall spending has gone up.
Believe it or not, American families used to spend over 5 percent of their income, or more than $5,500 per year in inflation-adjusted dollars, on clothing and footwear. Today, families spend only 1.9 percent of their income on apparel, or just over $3,000 per year. Those numbers align with the collapse in real clothing prices in the 21st century, even as we buy more clothing items than ever. Score one for better living standards.
Entertainment and recreation have also gotten more affordable, rising slightly in real terms since 1984 but falling as a share of income from 4.9 percent to 3.2 percent. Yes, sporting events and concert tickets have gotten pricier, but consider the savings on televisions, in-home viewing, and music. In this category, too, Americans consume more entertainment than at any point in history.
Other miscellaneous expenses have also shrunk. Personal-care spending has fallen from $1,542 in 1972–73 to $1,372 in 2024. Reading expenses have dwindled (tragically) from a peak of $485 in 1984 to a mere $189. Life and personal insurance used to eat up 2.5 percent of income; now that employers pick up most of the bill, it’s 0.5 percent.
The greatest triumph is spending on food. . . .
Then, there’s the elephant in the room: Since 1972–73, total spending on housing has risen from $23,287 per family to $34,655 — the largest absolute increase ($11,368) of any category by far. Because of growth in income, however, families are actually spending a lower share on housing than they did a half century ago. Within the broad housing bucket, spending on shelter — which includes mortgage interest, property taxes, insurance, and maintenance — rose from $11,468 to $20,522. Spending on occupant-owned homes specifically (excluding rented dwellings and other lodging) increased from $7,832 per year to $15,036.
Some of that increase has been counteracted by falling costs for other housing-related expenditures. Electricity, other utilities, and household furnishings have all become more affordable in both inflation-adjusted dollars and relative to earnings. But housing is still the greatest burden on family budgets, eating up a fifth of pretax income. The second-largest category, transportation, is approximately half that share.
Christian Schneider, our foremost SNL expert, explains what the left is really doing with the Shane Gillis news cycle:
In the attention economy, consequential events fly by unnoticed while internet barkers take faux umbrage at the most inoffensive remarks. Social media exists for people to performatively and proudly misunderstand things to create a synthetic reality where only they have the moral high ground. If it isn’t Shane Gillis, it’s a new Sydney Sweeney ad or Sophie Cunningham expressing an opinion on biological males in women’s sports. It’s all just grist for the content mill.
And, of course, Gillis’s critics don’t much care for the cause of women’s rights. The Venn diagram of people yapping at Gillis yet savaging Susan Dell’s looks after she pledged over $6.2 billion to help kids start savings accounts is a single circle. Whether you’re allowed to age in public depends on your associations with the White House.
Yet progressives refuse to learn any lessons from their phony hysterics. They are blind to the ways their woke one-upmanship backfires. For one, Gillis’s monologue has prompted thousands of women across the country to post photos of themselves working out in very little clothing. The men come out way ahead on that transaction.
Further, any time they overreact to Gillis, it simply exposes their absurdity and makes him stronger. Gillis’s career exists because they don’t want it to — every complaint brings him more viewers and broadens his appeal. . . .
More than 60 years ago, the historian Daniel Boorstin warned that America was filling up with “pseudo-events,” happenings staged for no purpose other than to be reported on. He also defined the celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.”
Boorstin didn’t live to see Instagram, but he would have recognized Dan Levy on sight: a man famous mostly for his last name, manufacturing a scandal out of a joke in which the comedian was self-deprecating. None of this was ever about women, or gym shorts, or even Shane Gillis. It was about being seen being offended.
Eva Terry covers the nationally damaging consequences of red tape and litigation:
A mile beneath the arid, orange crust of Green River, Utah, flows a key ingredient in batteries: lithium. It’s trapped in brine, left over from an ancient marine bay. Extracting the critical mineral is technologically doable in 2026 — but it is a political and legal labyrinth.
Bruce Richardson, CEO of A1 Lithium, set out in 2017 to extract the element without wreaking havoc on the environment. He planned to use direct lithium extraction (DLE), which pumps lithium-rich brine from the earth, pulls the element from the water, then shoots the now-lithium-free liquid back to the depths.
After scouting sites on multiple continents, A1 Lithium settled on Moab, Utah. Richardson suspected the area was full of lithium-rich brine, so he applied for a permit to poke around in several vacated oil wells. The wells sat on federal land — managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) — which required him to begin the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) permitting process.
NEPA requirements are extremely common for projects in the West, due to the sheer quantity of federally owned land. Nearly all development on federal land triggers NEPA, which governs the ensuing environmental review. In Grand County, Utah, where Moab is located, about 87 percent of the land is federally owned; Emery County, just to the west, is about 92 percent federal.
As is typical with the five-decade-old process, Richardson’s quest for well exploration began with a one-year public consultation period. Then, with the community’s thoughts in mind, the BLM began putting together a 100-page environmental assessment (EA). The EA only allowed an initial probe of the wells and did not constitute approval for any commercial activity.
“There was considerable delay while the BLM kept changing their minds about the format of the report,” Richardson told National Review. “They were debating whether they wanted a bibliography or footnotes.” It took the BLM about three months to review the EA each time they made changes, he said.
After three years, the BLM granted A1 Lithium permission to perform an initial look at the wells. Almost immediately, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance sued the BLM, claiming A1 Lithium’s activities would hurt wildlife and lead to water contamination. . . .
While there are millions of tons of undiscovered lithium locked beneath American soil, the country is currently home to only one operating lithium mine, accounting for less than 1 percent of global lithium production. The lithium that powers Teslas, iPhones, and more is largely extracted from mines in Australia, Argentina, Chile, and China.
America doesn’t lack for lithium supply. It’s the burdensome permitting process and onerous environmental regulations that suppress domestic production.
That bottleneck has left the U.S. second to last globally for the speed at which mining projects proceed.
CODA
H/T to the great Will Swaim for turning me on to this band: Utopia, a Todd Rundgren joint. While their debut is sheer, unremitting prog splendor, Oops! Wrong Planet (something I recently picked up) dates from their late ’70s turn in a more pop-ward direction. The album is full of tight, bouncy melodies and lush harmonies. Very listenable, which is how you know they were changing genres. But most of all, I can’t get past the gnawing feeling that this song should have been on Spinal Tap’s setlist. You can almost envision the smoking drum stool.
Enjoy the fall weather. See you next time.